In Mesopotamia, love was felt in the liver and anger in the feet.

Dec. 5 () –

A multidisciplinary team has studied a large number of texts to find out how people in the ancient region of Mesopotamia experienced emotions in the body thousands of years ago.

analyzed a million words of the ancient Akkadian language from 934 to 612 BC. C. in the form of cuneiform writing on clay tablets. The results of the research were published in iScience magazine on December 4th.

From the feeling of heaviness to the tickling in the stomach, it seems inherent to the human condition to feel emotions in the body, not just in the brain. But Have we always felt – or at least expressed – these feelings in the same way?

“Even in ancient Mesopotamia, there was a rough understanding of anatomy, for example the importance of the heart, liver and lungs,” says Professor Saana Svärd of the University of Helsinki, an Assyriologist leading the research project. One of the most intriguing findings is related to the place where the ancients felt happiness, which was often expressed by words related to feeling “open”, “bright” or “full”: in the liver.

“If you compare the ancient Mesopotamian body map of happiness with modern body maps [publicados por el científico finlandés Lauri Nummenmaa y sus colegas hace una década]are largely similar, with the exception of a noticeable glow in the liver,” says in a statement cognitive neuroscientist Juha Lahnakoski, visiting researcher at Aalto University.

Other contrasting results between us and the ancients can be seen in emotions such as anger and love. According to previous research, modern humans experience anger in the upper body and hands, while Mesopotamians they felt more “heat”, “anger” or “tantrums” in their feet. Meanwhile, love is experienced quite similarly by modern man and the Neo-Assyrian, although in Mesopotamia it is particularly associated with the liver, the heart and the knees.

“It remains to be seen whether in the future we will be able to say something about what kind of emotional experiences are typical for humans in general and whether, for example, fear has always been felt in the same parts of the body. In addition, we have to take into account that texts are texts and emotions are lived and experienced,” says Svärd.

The researchers caution that while it is fascinating to compare, we must keep this distinction in mind when comparing modern body maps, which were based on self-reported body experience, with the body maps of the Mesopotamians based only on linguistic descriptions.

As literacy was rare in Mesopotamia (3000-300 BC), cuneiform writing was mainly produced by scribes and was therefore only available to the wealthy. However, cuneiform clay tablets contained a wide variety of texts, such as tax lists, sales documents, prayers, literature, and early historical and mathematical texts.

Ancient Near Eastern texts have never been studied in this way, quantitatively linking emotions to body parts. In the future, this method can be applied to other linguistic materials. “It could be a useful way to explore cross-cultural differences in the way we experience emotions“says Svärd, who hopes that the research will make an interesting contribution to the debate on the universality of emotions.

The corpus linguistic method, which uses large sets of texts, has been developed for many years at the Center of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires (ANEE), directed by Svärd. Next, the research team will examine an English corpus, or 20th-century textual material, containing 100 million words. Similarly, they also plan to examine Finnish data.